William Grayden

(1920)

Source: Courtesy William Grayden

In 1956, William Grayden was the member for South Perth in the
Western Australian Parliament. Three years earlier he had led an
expedition to the Central Aboriginal Reserve, an area of 34 million
acres of desert and semi desert terrain where some Wongi,
Pitjantjatjara and Ngaanatyara peoples continued to live as
hunter-gatherers.

Concerned about the precarious conditions of their life, made
worse by drought and violations of the reserve for weapons testing,
Grayden successfully pressed for a parliamentary inquiry. The
Report of the Select Committee appointed 'to inquire into Native
Welfare Conditions in the Laverton-Warburton Range Area' received
wide publicity and shocked those who found out about the starvation
and extreme deprivation experienced by these people.

When the findings of the report were questioned by Rupert
Murdoch of the Adelaide News, Grayden returned to the area
armed with a movie camera and accompanied by Pastor Doug Nicholls
and other Western Australian parliamentarians. This film, known
simply as the 'Warburton Ranges film' was used effectively by
activists to alert other Australians to the injustices experienced
by these dispossessed nomadic people and to press governments to
take greater responsibility for all Aboriginal Australians. The
'Warburton Ranges controversy', as it became known, led to the
formation of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League and,
indirectly, to the formation a year later of the Federal Council
for Aboriginal Advancement.